Three Times Dean Thought About Kissing a Man and One Time He Did
by tempusborealis
Summary: It shouldn't really be a surprise when he finally gives in, but perhaps he was just waiting for the right one. Perhaps he'd known who it was all along.


Thick fingers slid shells home firmly, with expertise. Each little thoonk niggled in the back of Dean's head, ringing for a second and spurring him closer and closer to opening his mouth to break the comfortable yet purposeful silence. Henriksen saved him the trouble.

"Shotgun shells full of salt," he sighed as he tossed a cartridge into the air and caught it.

"Whatever works," Dean replied, muscle memory taking over as round after round shimmied down the twin barrels.

"Fighting off monsters with condiments." Dean spared him a glance. Well damn. There was a sense of humor beneath all that gruff fed bluster. And the man knew how to handle a gun. That was enough to earn Dean's respect; if he had to guess how many law enforcement goons who didn't know a butt from a muzzle he'd out-smarted in his life, it'd probably number in the low hundreds. Dean took the opening and teased him about all the other creatures that were out there; they chuckled and sank into a startlingly easy sort of companionship.

He felt… like Henriksen's equal. It was a feeling Dean wasn't used to because the people that gave him any sort of respect could be counted on one hand. But if the sense of humor and the skill weren't enough, Victor Henriksen had swallowed his pride, admitted he was wrong, and had thankfully listened to him and Sam. The number of times law enforcement had done that was just plain low. This man who'd tracked him and Sam across the country like an expert huntsman was smart enough to see the writing on the wall and damn if that wasn't a miracle in and of itself.

And then he started talking. About himself, his job, his disappointments. Dean listened to a lot of people tell their stories every day, but they were usually just keepers of a piece of the puzzle. It was his job to collect them and put them all together – with a healthy serving of ass-kicking, of course.

Victor, though… Victor was different. He was outside all that, a feather falling slow and constant in a hailstorm of chaos, death, and blood. While the cases and people Dean interviewed soon slipped from his mind, here was Victor stringing them all together and making sense of them. Stitching his and Sam's lives out in red thread on a paper map.

So when Henriksen talked about his job, Dean listened. Actually listened and heard. And it resonated; Dean held that same deep-seated disappointment at how he threw years of his life at the unseen evils of the world and the fact of the matter was that they lost more people than they saved. Hell, they'd probably all be dead before the day was done – just add it to his tab.

But Victor was blunt, and that was the way Dean liked it. No time wasted on niceties. It was time they didn't have, never had. It was a directness that deserved to be reciprocated, so Dean leveled with him: they were probably not getting out of here alive. But they could go down swinging and Dean knew just from looking at him that Henriksen was the type to appreciate that kind of sensibility.

"Plus, you got nothing to go home to but your brother." Dean felt a soft, tired snort come up from the bottom of his lungs. Nothing that wasn't true.

"Yeah," he conceded, still loading his ammo. To his surprise, he found himself returning the unspoken question: "What about you, you rocking the white picket fence?" He never took an interest in things like this. Who cared? If they managed to get out of this scrape half-intact, he and Sam would go into hiding again, scurrying like cockroaches. It's not like he and Victor could be friends.

"Nah. Empty apartment, string of angry ex-wives; I'm right where you are." They held eyes for a moment and Dean huffed out a chuckle and Henriksen's eyes lit up with humor as he laughed. A heavy coating of knowing camaraderie spread through Dean and for a fleeting second he let himself imagine what it would be like to have a real friend. He spent that second watching Henriksen's lips form the words and in that time noticed how soft they looked. Soft like a woman's and plush enough to cushion him from resentment they themselves knew all too well. The breath in his lungs hissed out through his nose in one go and he snapped himself out of it. Man, the weird things imminent death brought to the fore of the mind.

"Imagine that."


End file.
